antipopper

A strange confluence of tendencies:

• I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes stories;

• I am now obsessed with pink velvet floral wallpaper;

• I’ve been watching Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng Chiang, which revels so unashamedly in the panic that comes with imperial decay;

• I’ve just started to read Dracula;

• All this to the luxuriant strains of Andre 3000′s The Love Below, which is strangely fitting.

This is accreting on me an ornate, maximalist taste that I never really knew I had before. And after not caring for so long about aesthetics (god, how alienated a designer must I be??), it’s gotten me interested again in the question of style, of the violence of the mark.

What stands out most clearly in Conan Doyle’s stories is that Holmes’ deductive logic is utterly reliant on a very particular kind of social typology of class, one in which station is marked so clearly on the body and its restricted patterns of movement, and one which necessarily predates mass consumerism. It’s all about servant girls inexpertly scraping the mud off boots, and other telling rituals of station, in which everything is in its right place. If we transplanted the Holmes character to 21st Century London, how would he fare? The inflexions of class are at work as ever, but the old typologies dissipate into a field of more disposable commodities and an ever churning market of liquified labour and shifting identifications.

Of course, the Victorian mirage of stable stratification under Empire was always a desperate illusion, always abjecting the transgressive sociality of class struggle, anti-imperialist movements and the like, and rechannelling structural anxieties into containable moral panics about barbarity, sexuality and race. (Cue Weng Chiang.) And without those intricately comfortable illusions of Empire now to bolster the new imperial pragmatism, perhaps panic is all that’s left. Without his clockwork typologies, would a 21st Century Holmes spiral into a more hysterical process of marking, with an intensified racialisation of criminality? We may throw away our boots and don’t take tea at the right time because we’re all working later, but we still have concentration camps.